From juvenile hall at 16 to making 6 figures his first year in business at 18; Stephen now owns 10+ corps! Stephen wants to share his knowledge in business!

Sep 8, 2017

5 Tips to Setting and Sticking to Your Goals

Everyone wants to be successful, but so many people find it hard to stay on track, or even actively set goals.

Everyone wants to be successful, but so many people find it hard to stay on track, or even actively set goals. It’s easy to think of generic questions or goal statements, which lead to unrealistic goals. Where do I want to be in five years? I want to save money. I am going to be healthier. These questions are so broad; it makes it hard to hard to reach them, and stay on track; the first way to make a goal easier to attain, is to be specific.

Make more money, start saving, start a new hobby, all of these are goals, but they are vague. How much money do you want to make? How much do you want to save? When/ what hobby do you want to start? When you create goals like these, they are so easy to reach because of hoe broad they are. But they are also very hard to stick to, so that they actually work for you. Instead of thinking, I want to make more money, set a specific goal like, I want to make X amount of dollars in X amount of time. It doesn’t have to be big, actually, its better to start small like save an extra hundred dollars a week for a month, this is attainable, and specific enough that you either make it or you don’t, there is no middle ground. Being specific with your goals will not only make them easier to reach, but it will make it harder for you to make excuses.

O.K. so we set a goal, no what? A lot of people have problems sticking to a goal. Its easy to make it a couple of days maybe even a couple f weeks, but a lot of the time its hard to stay on track if we don’t see results as quickly as we want to. One of my favorite ways to stay on track is to tell people I care about what I am doing, and I don’t mean mention it once. Tell them your hopes, your dreams, and everything you can about what you are doing. When you talk about what you want to happen, not only do you get excited again, but you also will have people checking up on you in the future. This is a way of creating crowd source accountability, meaning if you don’t hold yourself to what you said, everyone will know. There are few motivators in the world that can reach all personality types, but one of them is disappointing ones you love.

Now that you have set your goal, and made sure it was specific you can give yourself a time limit. It is important to pick a realistic date, even if you work well under pressure it doesn’t mean you need to be constantly stressing yourself out over your goals. Also you don’t want to pick a timeframe that allows you to much time, this could be counterintuitive. When setting your goal date, make sure to take into consideration other things that are happening in your life, if you have a big presentation due, or a ton of meetings set up its going to make it very hard to get everything done. Setting a goal date helps make you to think about the goal more often, if you have endless time to complete your goal, it seems much less important. Setting a goal date is also setting you on the right track for holding yourself accountable.

When you tell other people what your doing, it’s a way of other people holding you accountable, so how do we hold ourselves accountable? Every person is motivated differently, so people can be motivated by rewards, others punishment, some people are just driven by passion. First you have to figure out what motivates you more, personally when I need to hold myself accountable I set an amount of money I owe others if my goal isn’t completed by my goal date. Once you figure out what motivates you the most, its time to find your accountability buddy. You can pick anyone for an accountability buddy, a friend, a coworker, or even a coach. The purpose of an accountability buddy is to make sure that you stay on track, someone to check in with you, and help you if you need it. The trick is to make sure to pick someone who is genuinely interested in your success.

The final tip for todays article may seem a bit obvious, just believe in yourself. No matter how many times we are told to believe in ourselves, so many people struggle with gaining the confidence to actually implement it. I truly believe affirmations are a great way to help yourself gain confidence. Start every morning telling yourself that you can, and will do whatever you want, remind yourself that you are awesome, and it is ok that mistakes are made. Confidence isn’t something you can just pull out of thin air, it is something that you must constantly work on, and put an effort into keeping up.

Setting goals can seem like a large task but when you break it into small bites each goal can be accomplished. Each time you reach one of your goals, it will give you more confidence, and motivation to keep pushing your life forward; and each goal you reach is a win for you, and your growing business.